Today in my education course (which is for those going to teach history/social studies at the secondary level), our professor invited former students of hers from last year to come in and discuss their experiences as first-year teachers. It was…very interesting. One girl who got a job at an inner-city school in New Haven had an especially absurd first month as a teacher. For starters, she’s spent more money on supplies—roughly a thousand dollars—than she’s earned so far because her school lacks such basic resources.
The thing that really caught my attention, though, was a certain anecdote about data collection. For the uninitiated, data collection is a major part of the education system. Teachers take in data (from standardized tests, mainly), format it in graphs, and use it to identify areas in which students need help (right down to which kind of question they need assistance with). This is going to be one of the few times you’ll hear me admit this, but standardized testing can be—and is—a useful tool for identifying these types of weaknesses in students.
Anyway. This first-year teacher relayed something that appalled both her and everyone else in the room. Her school has taken the graph showing students’ standardized test scores—complete with their names—and posted it in the school’s first room. It is literally the first thing you see upon entering the building. And the students know what’s up, too—she said they look at the damn chart every time they pass it. I found that rather heartbreaking. My friend told me that when she was working at Borders in the past, they did the same thing. It’s nice to know that we are preparing our low-income students for the rat-race psychology of retail work. (Not).
Another gem from this evening came when one teacher said, “they’re scrapping the CMT [the Connecticut Mastery Test, the standardized exam which determines state funding for schools in this state] before too long!” Myself and a few of my classmates stared at each other in total—even blissful—confusion for a moment, imagining a world without the CMT. Then the other shoe dropped: “…because they’re replacing it with a nationwide standardized exam.” Oh, but of course!
As I noted earlier, these tests can be an important resource in being able to gauge certain skills in students, particularly those revolving around reading and writing. The 8th-grade teacher that I’m working with right now actually uses CMT scores to optimally pair students for group-work. It’s great. However, they are not the best or most useful tool in the school system’s arsenal. The push for testing, as best exemplified by the No Child Left Behind Act, has been a failure despite the good intentions of many who championed it. One of the teachers who spoke with my class tonight got a job up in Waterbury, another of Connecticut’s inner-city areas (we have several, despite the image many people seem to have of this state as being populated by clones of the Monopoly man). Teachers at his school were recently fired for cheating on tests, inflating their students’ scores to ridiculous highs. This is only one such incident from around the U.S.; such cheating could have been easily foreseen, however, by looking at the unrealistic and cartoonish standards that NCLB created. Even the so-called “Texas miracle,” upon which George W. Bush rode to pass NCLB, was little more than smoke and mirrors. We have lost, and no one seems to want to admit it. That a national exam is currently in development speaks volumes to our hubris. So does the fact that we are trying to move this model of education to other countries—researchers in Europe, Latin America, and other regions are wary of our possible exportation of this testing battery.
It is for all of the above reasons why I am also skeptical of a national curriculum being established in this country. While it sounds like a step in the right direction—some national coherence on education policy would certainly be nice in a country where textbook manufacturers seem to call most of those shots—I doubt it will be a panacea to the woes of the education system. It will likely be perverted in much the same way that NCLB and tests were; good intentions ruined by incompetence and a lack of realistic expectations. I can see teachers trapped in a future where they have less control over their own lessons, being forced to hew closely to a prescriptive curriculum that will tie into the latest, greatest nationwide standardized exam…the results of which will show once again that American students perform lower than their Chinese or Scandinavian peers. Flabbergasted, we’ll repeat the cycle indefinitely.
However, I will tell you that the four teachers who came to speak with my class all mentioned how rewarding their work is and how they can’t imagine doing anything else. It’s comforting to know that the testing sideshow will never truly overtake the joy of teaching.
